Mais le paysage est encore là

An all time metaphor, Min Jung-Yeon’s landscapes evolve with her.
Her work took on a new fluidity and a powerful gesturality with the creation of her monumental installation Tissage, which was presented at the MNAAG – Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet in 2019-2020. An energy was released and now contributes its impetus, sometimes violent, sometimes like a gentle exhalation. The compositions, once entirely thought out, now go with the flow, closely coexisting with the thoroughness of which the artist is capable. Opposites and their struggles, recurring subjects in her work, have melted into an intimate embrace, if not a face-off.

In the past, round edges and angles clashed in dense compositions. Henceforth, the artist’s work conveys a more pacified sensation: the relationship between matter and void presents a new balance.
Min Jung-Yeon creates to better erase and recreate. Brush strokes, prints, fluid materials of diluted acrylic on canvas. In this process, fossilised times accumulate and overlap: Skeletons, rocks, visions and dreams appear in perspectives which are often strange. Amongst her landscapes, we find those of her childhood in the Korean countryside, those glimpsed or dreamed, or those anchored in her visual memory, including the imaginary landscapes of Ahn Gyeon, a great figure of fifteenth-century Korean art.

Reality is a dream, and dream becomes reality. The seasons pass, the emotions surge forth; lights and thoughts come and go. The intense hues, powerful contrasts and mirages of summer give way to autumn, and occasionally to nostalgia. The landscape is experienced from within, the sun becomes scarcer, spring is still only a promise. The memory we were looking for is lost, leaving behind only matter, colour, gesture… The eyes scrutinise, forms stand out and manifest themselves: cliffs, stalactites, stalagmites and suddenly a line, a drip, or a flat area of colour impose themselves. The works are presented to us in a frontal, almost scenic and horizontal way, but they also display a verticality, that of strata. Thus Min Jung-Yeon establishes a temporality: her own.